Twitter Drives Traffic

I was chatting with Chris Brogan the other day… somehow, we ended up talking about Twitter, and he told me that Twitter is his #4 traffic source!

(Just in case you are curious, Google is his #1, direct traffic is #2, then Bing at #3, then Twitter. This lineup bodes well for Twitter, don’t you think, considering it’s Chris’ #1 referral traffic source!)

Yes, Chris finds it ‘weird’ that people don’t think much about Twitter as a great website traffic driver.

Bottom line is Twitter marketing DOES work.

“Will it still work tomorrow though?…” some might ask.

Hmmm…

What if all your Google search engine traffic disappeared tomorrow? Would you stop optimizing your site for search engines?

Oh, wait… that’s called ‘algorithm updates‘! ?

Traffic from Google is the very definition of ‘here today, gone tomorrow‘ kind of traffic; yet here we are, knocking ourselves out to get it!

And what about Facebook and its ‘zero reach‘ for business pages? Did you put a lid on your Facebook marketing, despite the fact you are barely reaching your audience? Exactly.

Successfully marketing your business is about reaching your ideal audience where it is TODAY, right NOW. If you don’t, you bet your competitors will.

That’s exactly why I am such a huge proponent of content repurposing, by the way.

Do You Really Need Twitter Automation Tools?

Twitter automation tools to Twitter marketing are what cookies are to milk.

Sure you can have one without the other, but… why would you?

Together, they simply make sense.

Automating the right Twitter tasks (like following and unfollowing users) in the right (for you) way will result in more

targeted Twitter followers,

Twitter traffic to your website,

? at the end of the rainbow. ?

…guaranteed.

What Should You Automate on Twitter?

There are two sides to your Twitter presence:

growing the number of your Twitter followers (targeting/following/unfollowing)

engaging/interacting with those followers

The latter, engaging and interacting with your Twitter followers, is best left to a human – YOU.

The former, growing the number of your Twitter followers, is what you should be using Twitter automation tools for.

How Exactly Do You Get More Twitter Followers?

BE INTERESTING

There you have it. The key to successful Twitter marketing. Go do it.

? ?

Still here? Alrighty then…

Some might say that all you need on Twitter is love, and followers will… well, follow.

Pfffffttt…

Sure you can rely on your established name/brand/quality content to wait for Twitter followers to come.

Wouldn’t that be nice?…

In reality, that never happens… unless you have an established name/brand. DO you?…

While being interesting on Twitter (an attention-grabbing bio, profile pic of YOU, useful to your potential Twitter followers content, being present and engaging with Twitter users) is a must, what you and I are interested in today are the mechanics of getting more Twitter followers.

What you need is:

targeted Twitter followers (QUALITY)

and more of them (QUANTITY)

Introduce yourself and your quality content to as many potential Twitter followers as you think might be interested in your message, in other words.

Not only do they violate just about every Twitter rule, but they often add followers with abandoned accounts or bot accounts that are not reading your updates.

Bots don’t make very good customers! ?

Another type of automation tool Twitter is definitely against is the fully automated kind. Tweet Adder and Social Quant were good examples of those.

Tweet Adder and Social Quant were the tools I and many other Twitter users relied on for years to grow the number of followers on Twitter.

However, according to the current Twitter API rules, automatically getting more Twitter followers (as in ‘software that follows/unfollows any given list of people completely automatically‘) is no longer an option.

That’s why both Tweet Adder and Social Quant, as well as a few similar Twitter tools, were shut down for good.

Now that full automation is the thing of the past, the best Twitter tools are those that allow you to target your potential Twitter audience as specifically as possible, plus follow/unfollow Twitter users in the most efficient manner possible.

In other words, you are still the one who has to literally click follow/unfollow buttons… ‘manual automation’, if you will.

STEP 1. Use Twitter Automation Tool to Follow the Right Users

Ten engaged Twitter followers who want what you have to offer beat hundreds who could care less.

Thus, the first thing you are looking for in the right Twitter tool is the ability to target the right people.

Most Twitter follow tools let you:

Follow any user’s Twitter followersFor instance, if you want to ‘steal’ your competitor’s Twitter followers, you can enter @CompetitorUsername and let the Twitter tool pull up the list of their followers. All you have to do then is… follow them!

Follow people another Twitter user followsTake me, for instance (@AnaTrafficCafe on Twitter.) I have close to 10,000 followers, but follow only some 130 people. You might, rightfully so, conclude that I only follow people whom I hope to learn from. With this feature, you are able to follow the people I follow.

Follow members of any Twitter listSelf explanatory: follow members of any Twitter list!

Follow Twitter users by #topicCompile a list of Twitter user who mentioned a specific #hashtag.

Helpful: How to Manage Twitter Like a Pro [Your Daily Twitter Routine]

By the way, even though I did say ‘No tools required‘ to be present, tools DO help tremendously to manage your Twitter and other social media accounts a lot more efficiently.

I use Agorapulse for that; you’ll learn more about it below.

FINALLY… onto the best Twitter tools to grow your Twitter presence!

The best Twitter tool to get more followers is… the one you might already be using.

Like a social media management platform that helps you maintain various social media accounts.

Hootsuite. Buffer. Sprout Social. Or Agorapulse, like it is for me.

DISCLOSURE: there are several affiliate links in this post. That means that, should you choose to buy a product following one of those links, I will receive a commission from the product creators. Doesn’t cost you a dime, but helps me to continue offering all content at Traffic Generation Café 100% free.

At first glance, you might struggle to see how a Twitter tool like Agorapulse could help you grow your Twitter followers; especially when it comes to following and unfollowing users.

Allow me to show you.

Agorapulse has a Listening feature that could be used to find your perfect Twitter audience. Using that feature, you can easily find people tweeting about specific subjects or mentioning you.

To see how it works,

choose your Twitter profile

click Listening

click Create a new search

The next screen has the option to Create a new search.

You can search by hashtags, multiple words, phrases, or Twitter handles. Click Next when done.

Now that your search is saved, back to the Dashboard you go.

From there, click Filters, then specify the saved search results you’d like to see.

Click any tweet and you’ll see options like liking, replying, opening it in Twitter, and yes, following that person.

Extremely targeted, easy, and efficient – now you see why I love Agorapulse so much! ??

If you are already using a social media management platform, look for a feature similar to Agorapulse Listening.

If not, I highly recommend you check out what Agorapulse can do for your business.

And, by the way, Agorapulse is 100% Twitter compliant.

A bit of a drawback is that you can’t unfollow Twitter users with Agorapulse.

If unfollowing is something you are planning on doing, you should look into one of the Twitter tools below.

RIP, ManageFlitter.com

Wow… just as I was about to recommend ManageFlitter as my top follow/unfollow Twitter tool, it was (permanently?) shut down by Twitter for violating Twitter automation rules!

And that was the tool that I and star Twitter marketers like Madalyn Sklar believed to be as safe and Twitter-compliant as they come…

We love you, Twitter, but really?…

Since ManageFlitter is no more, we’ll take a look at Tweepi instead.

The very first thing you’ll like about Tweepi is how simple the dashboard is.

There are three actions you can take with Tweepi:

Tweepi also offers to make your life even simpler (or so it seems) with its personalized Tweepi AI recommendations.

I took a good look at those recommendations and decided ‘No, thank you.’

Are you going to follow Tweepi AI recommendations or decide what’s good (or not!) for your business all on your own?… ???

Tweepi Follow Tool

Tweepi Follow tool allows you to:

Follow any user’s Twitter followers

Follow people another Twitter user follows

Follow members of any Twitter list

Import (copy/paste, to be more precise) your own list of Twitter users you’d like to follow

Follow Twitter users by #topic or location

Since the features you get with Tweepi depends on your account status (free or paid), let’s talk about that.

Tweepi offers a free package in addition to two Premium plans.

Tweepi Free vs Premium

Tweepi free package is a good way to take the service for a spin.

Since they don’t make the link to create a free account readily available, here it is. 😉

However, I am going to tell you to get a Premium account with Tweepi.

I am NOT affiliated with Tweepi in any way; that’s not why I am trying to sell you on it.

The reason I tell you to go all in is because I’ve seen one too many Twitter tools disappear into thin air as of late, including the recent demise of ManageFlitter.

That’s why you should absolutely take full advantage of Tweepi or TweetAttacksPro (more on that one below), while they are still around.

There you have it; I said my piece. Think about it. Then act.

Here’s how much Tweepi Premium accounts currently run:

Please keep in mind that a Tweepi account can only be linked to one Twitter account. If you have more than one Twitter account, you’ll need to pay a separate monthly fee for each.

OF NOTE

Tweepi free accounts are limited to following 100 users and unfollowing 100 users per day.

For Premium accounts, following is limited to 950 users per day and unfollowing is limited to 500 users per day.

If you ask me, 950 and 500 per day is waaaaaaay too aggressive. Proceed with extreme caution.

Tweepi Unfollow Tool

You’ll be presented with the list of Twitter users whom you follow, but who don’t follow you back.

You can choose to apply various filters to further narrow down that list.

For instance, you can unfollow Twitter users with:

inactive accounts,

no bio descriptions,

egg avatars,

and many other criteria.

Once you have your unfollow list in place, simply hover over the name, and you’ll see the blue Unfollow button.

Simple and impressive.

Twitter Follow/Unfollow Tools I’d Stay Away from

There were a couple of Twitter tools I checked out and found that the Follow/Unfollow features were too slim to be worth your time:

By the way, if you do test a third-party tool/application that asks you to connect to your account on Twitter (in developer’s terms, that’s called OAuth), that means you give that tool access to your Twitter account.

OAuth is an authentication protocol that allows you to approve a tool/application to act on your behalf without sharing your password.

And what happens if you no longer use the tool? It will continue to have access to your Twitter account, unless you specifically revoke that access.

I strongly suggest you do so.

Twitter has been known to terminate user accounts simply because those users, at one point or another, gave access to an app that was later found to be breaking Twitter automation rules and suspended by Twitter – even if they haven’t used the app for years.

To do revoke access to your Twitter account, go to Settings and Privacy…

…then click Revoke access to cut off any unwanted app(s).

How to Choose the Best Twitter Tool

So, how do you pick the Twitter tool that best suits YOUR Twitter marketing needs?

Your risk tolerance is your best guide.

The Best Twitter Tool for the Straight Shooter [White Hat]

If you are a straight shooter and prefer to be safe than sorry, then grow your Twitter followers completely organically with the help of a platform like Agorapulse.

Organic growth is all about hands-on genuine engagement, beneficial to all parties involved – you, people you follow, people you want to be followed by, and their Twitter followers.

Follower by follower, establish yourself as someone worth following, and Twitter users will start flocking to your account all on their own – a thing of beauty, let me tell you! 😉

DISCLOSURE: there are several affiliate links in this post. That means that, should you choose to buy a product following one of those links, I will receive a commission from the product creators. Doesn’t cost you a dime, but helps me to continue offering all content at Traffic Generation Café 100% free.

Why do I like TweetAttacksPro that much?

Two reasons:

TweetAttacksPro allows you to fine-tune your Twitter strategy like no other Twitter tool.

I love the fact you can run it independent of Twitter API. That means Twitter can’t just cut off TweetAttacksPro, like it did with ManageFlitter.

TweetAttacksPro also works well for all shades of gray – people who are comfortable with Gray Hat Twitter marketing and Blackhatters alike.

Don’t use ANY follow/unfollow automation tool on your primary Twitter account – the one that you’d absolutely hate to lose.

Grow that one as organically as you can. Use Agorapulse to help you, that’s it.

How I Gained over 100K+ Followers on Twitter

Back when I started Traffic Generation Café, I quickly took it from an unknown blog to top 18,000 global sites according to Alexa.com… in 4 months.

What is Alexa website ranking? <= learn here

And Twitter was largely how I got there. It was the first traffic generation strategy I mastered. I…

read everything I could get my hands on about Twitter marketing,

experimented with various Twitter automation tools,

created a compelling reason to bring my new Twitter followers back to Traffic Generation Café,

then perfected the entire process to the point where it took me 20-30 minutes a day to continue driving loads of Twitter traffic.

Here’s my process, in a nutshell:

Create several Twitter accounts.Five, to be precise. Multiple Twitter accounts are completely within Twitter rules, IF they are substantially different and you don’t crosspost between them – meaning, don’t post the same tweets across those accounts. Why create multiple accounts? To multiply the number of Twitter followers you can target at the same time.

Get TweetAttackPro.I used TweetAdder back then. This was a must – there was no way I could’ve done this by hand.

Search for TARGETED potential Twitter followers.Don’t skip this step – you can’t sell a burger to a vegetarian!

Start following Twitter users on a daily basis.While closely watching Twitter limits, of course. I also avoided full automation.

Send new Twitter followers a killer DM message.I offered my new followers to promote their blogs at Traffic Generation Café; that’s how I quickly transitioned them back to MY online turf. 😉

Tweet valuable to your followers content.I use Agorapulse to help me make this seemingly overwhelming task a LOT more manageable.

Be present.Monitor @mentions, thank people when they share your content, share others’ content MORE than you share your own. Be present, be human.

As a result of this Twitter traffic strategy ‘a la Ana‘, I got thousands of new website visitors every month – without the overwhelm.

Of course, it didn’t go without a glitch. I had a couple of accounts shut down by Twitter.

However, I knew the risks, accepted them, and didn’t cry much about the lost accounts. The website traffic I received as a result far outweighed the downsides of being a gray hatter. No guts, no glory!

Here’s another bonus for you: my exact follow/unfollow pattern I used back then.

Feel free to lower those numbers according to your risk tolerance. I wouldn’t up them though. 😉

The first number is what I called a peaceful takeover, the second one is more of a hostile (aggressive) one.